Adobe To Charge Users For Acrobat.com Services

Adobe announced Monday that Acrobat.com has moved out of a beta and that they would begin charging for its online PDF reader software.

Adobe will be charging users a subscription fee, starting at $14.99 a month for basic service, which would allow for web meetings with up to five participates and 10 uploaded documents that can be converted to a PDF per month.

If you need for a larger capacity meeting or the unlimited use of PDF conversions, you'll have to opt for the premium plus service which costs $39.99 per month. With the premium service you will have the ability to hold 20 person meetings and will have unlimited use of the PDF conversion service.

With the high prices, I don't suspect that many consumers would be interesting in paying for such services - at least not for personal use. Perhaps the new models are geared strictly towards business use.

Adobe said they have over five million users signed up for Acrobat.com since the June 2008 launch. If they could retain at least 10% of those users, they could potentially be looking at around $13 million per month in revenues on average from the new service. That's $13 million they didn't have before, so it might turn into quite the money maker.